Screenwriters Hate AI, and Who Can Blame Them?

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Copyeditor’s note: This post contains light spoilers for the final season of Hacks and for The Devil Wears Prada 2. And also Dune. You haven’t seen Dune yet? Get on it! You’ve been warned! Don't yell at us on the internet!

In the final season of Hacks, veteran comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) considers partnering with QuikScribbl, a large language learning model (LLM) that purports to use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate jokes. “It’s an AI chatbot that helps people sound like the most optimized, funniest, smartest version of themselves,” says the start-up’s founder Graham Sweeney (Alex Moffat). Despite needing the money to invest in the hotel Vance is refurbishing, her co-writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) points out the environmental and community harms of AI and begs Vance not to close the deal. But Vance doesn’t really care about the effects of AI until Sweeney suggests she will eventually be using QuikScribbl to write her own material. After all, he claims, other comedians are already using generative AI to optimize their stand-up routines.

When Vance pushes back and says she would never use AI to write a joke, Sweeney defaults to the “unique” selling point we are all tired of hearing about generative AI products: He created a shortcut for creative work. Why not use it? “You’re telling me that if you got stuck on a punchline and you had a tool at your disposal to help you with that, you wouldn’t use it?” There’s an incredulity to the question, an incredulity common among AI pushers. They constantly ask writers, artists, and creatives more broadly: Why wouldn’t you want your life and your work to be frictionless? Don’t you want writing to be easier? Who wouldn’t want to use a shortcut?

“Why are you trying to optimize the creative process?” Vance shoots back. “I mean, that’s one of the things we’ve actually figured out... we’re good there, you know. And we have been ever since cavemen told stories about bears.” Sweeney feels disrespected by Vance’s stance—suddenly it isn’t just about the money, but about believing in the genius of QuikScribbl and AI more generally. Vance has to believe that Sweeney is bringing something truly useful to the table, something that will revolutionize comedy, but she doesn’t.

“Every time [a] joke didn’t work, not only did I make it better, but it made me a comedian,” Vance says about the creative process. “Because to become one, you have to do it and fail, and do it and fail, over and over and over, until you figure out who you are.” After the disagreement, Vance realizes the deal with QuikScribbl isn’t for her. She decides to cut costs of her refurbishing project instead. “I can get any comic I want to train my AI,” Sweeney boasts as they part ways. Money talks, and he knows that.

As the implementation of AI disrupts dozens of industries, it isn’t surprising that a crop of recent television shows and movies are depicting the villainy of this rapidly changing technology. After all, screenwriters have been at the forefront of this fight. 

“We were on the front lines as both the people who are being stolen from, and the people whose work is being used to eliminate them,” Carolyn Lipka, who co-wrote Hacks’ QuikScribbl episode, told The Flytrap. “We went into the 2023 strike thinking that the big fight was going to be over residuals. We had no idea that we were going in on an AI fight.”

The implementation of AI in the workforce is inherently anti-worker and anti-human, both in how it might replace us and in how it might force workers to push themselves to inhumane levels of work to prove their worth or fill the gaps the machine leaves behind.